In the first comment of this article (December 10), I mentioned Home-Made Digital Clock Keeps on Ticking. Well someone just e-mailed me to say that he built two clocks with the MM531x series clock chips and he still has the data book. He wrote:

"I have the 1977 National Semiconductor MOS/LSI databook on the shelf behind me, the MM5316 data runs from page 1-9 thru page 1-13. Paper is somewhat yellowed with age."

I thought about buying one of those turntables to digitize my vinyl recordings, then realized that the unit would outlive its usefulness and besides, I really didn;t want ot listen to the music anyway.

What do you do with the turntable once you've digitized all your vinyl recordings? It kind of has a limitee usefulness after that.

Indeed. It is sitting on a bookshelf. I offered it to other members of my family who also have extensive LP collections, but none were as enthusiastic about the idea. Still it wasn't that expensive (less than $200) and I went into the project with the knowledge that its usefulness was limited.

I use Audacity on my XP dn Win7 computers. The Win7 version stopped recording from the microphone input. No idea why. I switched to plugging my phone into a batter-operated voice recorder, then transfer the mp3 output to my PC. It's great for recording interviews.

The older version of Audacity on my XP laptop works perfectly. I often use it to record streaming audio.